Himeji: A Scalable Centralized System for Authorization at Airbnb

The Problem Over the last couple of years, Airbnb engineering moved from a monolithic Ruby on Rails architecture to a service oriented architecture. In our Rails architecture, we had an API per resource to access the underlying data. These APIs had authorization…

How Airbnb Standardized Metric Computation at Scale

Part II: The six design principles of Minerva compute infrastructure By: Amit Pahwa, Cristian Figueroa, Donghan Zhang, Haim Grosman, John Bodley, Jonathan Parks, Maggie Zhu, Philip Weiss, Robert Chang, Shao Xie, Sylvia Tomiyama, Xiaohui Sun Introduction As described in the first post of this series, Airbnb invested significantly in building Minerva, a single source of truth metric platform that standardizes the…

Building an Inclusive Codebase

By: Michael Bachand, Amanda Vawter, Dan Federman, Jake Silver, Julia Wang, Mark Tai Code is our craft. At Airbnb, we view our code and product as a reflection of our values. Each developer imbues their work with a piece of themselves. We want…

Introducing MvRx: Android on Autopilot

Havana Vieja, a great place to hang out at Airbnb HQ when you want to… At Airbnb, we are moving at a faster pace than ever. Each year, more and more people are using Airbnb to travel. This year alone, we have already launched Airbnb Plus and we have countless other projects underway that we can’t wait to share. On the Android side of things…

Achieving Insights and Savings with Cost Data

by Anna Matlin and Tamar Eterman Introduction Business profitability and sustainability are powerful reasons to invest in infrastructure efficiency, but it is easy to feel lost about how to actually reduce costs. A foundation of robust and actionable data is essential for a successful efficiency program. At Airbnb, building this foundation…

How Airbnb is Moving 10x Faster at Scale with GraphQL and Apollo

I had the opportunity to kick off GraphQL Summit last month with a talk that involved quite a bit of live coding (the Keynote intro ends at minute 6:00 if you’re in a hurry!). Check it out: From the feedback I gathered over the following days of the conference…

Scaling a Mature Data Pipeline — Managing Overhead

Author: Zachary Ennenga The view from the third floor at Airbnb HQ! Background There is often a natural evolution in the tooling, organization, and technical underpinning of data pipelines. Most data teams and data pipelines are born from a monolithic collection of queries. As the pipeline grows in its complexity, it becomes sensible to leverage the Java or Python Spark…

Zooming Towards Human Connection

By: Fatemeh Alavizadeh, Mojtaba Mehrara Meet the dogs of Chernobyl on this Online Experience hosted by Lucas Introduction Creating human connection is the core of Airbnb’s mission. We launched Airbnb Experiences to encourage travelers to connect with locals and with each other through one-of-a-kind experiences that highlight the uniqueness of their destinations. We’ve since grown it to a community of hosts leading more…

Building Services at Airbnb, Part 2

By Liang Guo and Frank Lin Vittoria is treating his guests to a tour of the Limoncello factory, where family makes… Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards SOA. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly service platform is essential in an architectural evolution. In a previous post, we shared a bird’s-eye view of what we have designed and built to scale the development of services and gave…

Introducing visx from Airbnb

by Chris Williams & Harrison Shoff After 3 years of development, 2.5 years of production use at Airbnb, and a rewrite in TypeScript we are excited to announce the official 1.0 release of visx (formerly vx). You can find the project on GitHub and browse documentation and examples on airbnb.io. …

Experimentation & Measurement for Search Engine Optimization

Our San Francisco headquarters has it all, from comfy nooks to sunlit views. It’s the… For many of our potential guests, planning a trip starts at the search engine. At Airbnb, we want our product to be painless to find for past guests, and easy to discover for new ones. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving our site — and more specifically…

A Deep Dive into Airbnb’s Server-Driven UI System

By Ryan Brooks Background: Server-Driven UI Before we dive into Airbnb’s implementation of server-driven UI (SDUI), it’s important to understand the general idea of SDUI and how it provides an advantage over traditional client-driven…

Data Quality at Airbnb

Authors: Vaughn Quoss, Jonathan Parks, Paul Ellwood Introduction At Airbnb, we’ve always had a data-driven culture. We’ve assembled top-notch data science and engineering teams, built industry-leading data infrastructure, and launched numerous successful open source projects, including Apache Airflow and Apache Superset. Meanwhile, Airbnb has…

Airbnb’s Promotions and Communications Platform

By Paritosh Aggarwal and Henry Wu Introduction Airbnb is a busy marketplace with millions of active users across the globe. Billions of messages…

On Spark, Hive, and Small Files: An In-Depth Look at Spark Partitioning Strategies

Author: Zachary Ennenga Airbnb’s new office building, 650 Townsend Background At Airbnb, our offline data processing ecosystem contains many mission-critical, time-sensitive jobs — it is essential for us to maximize the stability and efficiency of our data pipeline infrastructure. So, when a few months back, we encountered a recurring issue that caused significant outages of our data…

Scaling Spark Streaming for Logging Event Ingestion

by Hao Wang and Liyin Tang Walking over a stream during an Airbnb Experience in Kuala Lumpur. Searching, viewing, and booking… Logging Event Ingestion at Airbnb Logging events are emitted from clients (such as mobile apps and web browser) and online services with key information and context about the actions or operations. Each event carries a specific piece of information. For example, when a guest searches for a beach house…

Learning Market Dynamics for Optimal Pricing

How do you think market dynamics influences this beautiful home in Cape Town? Market dynamics plays a key role in matching guests with hosts in two-sided marketplaces such as Airbnb. Supply and demand vary drastically across different locations, different check in dates and different lead times until check-in. It is important for us to understand and forecast these spatial and temporal trends in…

Contextualizing Airbnb by Building Knowledge Graph

By Xiaoya Wei and Yizheng Liao A riverfront, all-bamboo house on Airbnb in Bali. Imagine you are planning a trip to Los Angeles. The first step is to visit Airbnb.com and search for “Los Angeles.” On the backend, the query “Los Angeles” is translated into a block on the map; available Homes within this block are returned in…

Reconciling GraphQL and Thrift at Airbnb

The.WAV hosting AFROHAUS Brunch in Los Angeles a few months ago Backend Engineer: Hmm. So you’re saying this “GraphQL” will allow any web or native engineer to arbitrarily query basically any field in any backend service, recursively, however they want, without any backend engineers involved? Frontend Engineer: Yeah, right? It’s amazing! […silence…] Backend Engineer: Guards, seize this person. For several years…

Introducing Showkase: A Library to Organize, Discover, and Visualize Your Jetpack Compose Elements

Over the last few years, Android™ development has gone through significant changes in how apps are structured, the language used for development, the tooling & libraries that speed up our development, and the improvements in testing apps. What didn’t change in all these years is the Android UI toolkit. This…

Better Android Testing at Airbnb

A seven part series on Android Test Frameworks we’ve built at Airbnb — this first part looks at our philosophy on testing, and the mocking system that lays the foundation for all our tests. Automated testing for Android development has historically been challenging at Airbnb, due to both technical and…

How Druid enables analytics at Airbnb

By Pala Muthiah and Jinyang Li Wikipedia: A druid was a member of the high-ranking professional class in ancient Celtic cultures… Airbnb serves millions of guests and hosts in our community. Every second, their activities on Airbnb.com, such as searching, booking, and messaging, generate a huge amount of data we anonymize and use to improve the community’s experience on our platform. The Data Platform Team…

Building Services at Airbnb Part 3

By: Weibo He, Liang Guo A bright and spacious Airbnb Plus listing in London Airbnb is moving its infrastructure towards a service-oriented architecture. A reliable, performant, and developer-friendly polyglot service platform is an underpinning component in Airbnb’s architectural evolution. In Part 1 and Part 2 of our Building Services series, we shared how we used Thrift service IDL-centered service…

Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System

Authors: Jon Chew and Ninad Khisti One of the conference rooms in our San Francisco office Background Airbnb has been migrating its infrastructure to a Service Oriented Architecture (“SOA”). SOA offers many upsides, such as enabling developer specialization and the ability to iterate faster. However, it also poses challenges for billing and payments applications because it makes it more difficult to…

From Data to Action With Airbnb Plus

A new “Plus” listing in Chicago offers a beautiful loft setting with a clean aesthetic Internships are some of the most powerful experiences a student can have during college. Very few opportunities allow you to learn and grow so much in 12 short weeks. On top of that, taking on an internship helps with making connections, improving teamwork, and learning how to navigate organizations. This…